Sugar Fix Café

Logo | Print | Packaging | Neon Sign

Sugar Fix Café is a new hot spot right by California State University, Northridge that specializes in hand-crafting the best boba, espresso, and organic teas.

The owners of Sugar Fix connected with me on Instagram, and we hit it off and quickly got to work. They already had a good idea of what they wanted in a logo, and construction of their café was nearing a close. They asked me to take their "minimal", "beachy" vision for the brand and run with it.

Collaborating with the owners, I created a polished visual identity for the café and expanded that into stickers, shirts, customer loyalty stamp cards, a neon sign, and more!

The Sugar Fix team knew right away that they wanted their logo to depict one of their signature drinks in a clean, linear style, and had some colors in mind, too. Still, there was a ton of different directions that I could take with those initial ingredients, so there was still a lot of exploration and experimentation for me to do.

I grabbed a boba tea and some reference photos of similar drinks to get started, and churned out a board full of variations for potential logos. After sifting a few gems out of the clutter and bouncing those ideas back-and-forth with the team to refine them, we landed on purple, teal and yellow for the colors, and had a logo that was everything they wanted it to be.

The final Sugar Fix logo is minimal, but carefully crafted and packed with subtle symbolism. Let me break it down:

The foundation of the logo is a drink cup in its simplest form with a wide straw, iconic of boba milk tea. Tri-colored boba is a Sugar Fix specialty, so we used three colors for the brand, and included three pearls of boba at the bottom of the cup. We did take some liberty with these colors — tri-colored boba pearls are black, red and orange, so we exchanged those for three brighter, friendlier colors that better represent this SoCal cafe’s beachy atmosphere. You’ll also get a sense of the coastal vibe from a wave of liquid at the top of the cup, and a floating scoop of vanilla ice cream that resembles the sun.

"When I came across Pen & Mug on Instagram, I knew right away he was the logo artist for our cafe. I loved his style, his design personality, and his general artistic vibes. I described to him what I had envisioned, and he brought everything to life! The experience exceeded all of our expectations! Everyday people tell us how much they love our logo, and we couldn't be happier with our choice to work with Pen & Mug!"